Robert Horton

Spending an autumn in New York is the simple part, but the rest of the year gets more complicated. Let's see a movie about that.

This movie has straight-to-video written all over it.

The fact that isolated bits are amusing shouldn't keep us from strongly noting that this movie really is pretty awful -- not at all worthy of guilty pleasure status.

A lot of it works for two reasons: the situation allows for plenty of business with small-town eccentrics, and Jamie Foxx has been given a loose rein in the central role.

Nasty, regularly amusing black comedy.

Do not bring children to this movie unless you want them to have nightmares for weeks.

Oddly enough, I'm enjoying the memory of these jokes more than I actually enjoyed watching the film.

The movie is a mess.

A big disappointment.

Has even less directorial initiative than it has romantic spark.

Half vulgar and funny, half tedious and cloying; despite the shameless laughs, it's still a disappointment.

An amazing compendium of dumb behavior, bad dialogue, and incoherent direction.

Dumb and irritating.

It's just another bad horror film with inadequate young actors chased around a big house by something.

The film is Travolta's baby, but indifference and boredom is everywhere.

There is no obvious reason for the film's meandering existence: it's a series of beautifully photographed postcards of Africa.

Computer technology may be the actual phantom menace, after all.

A clumsy and tone-deaf comedy.

A standard morality tale, and looks especially weak in the shadow of "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Fight Club," which it resembles.

Floating this material slightly above the assembly-line level is the energetic cast and the efforts of writer-director Kris Isacsson.

So very general in its characters and story that it actively keeps you from enjoying the simple pleasures of a movie like this.

It probably helps to be loaded while you're watching this movie.

A dismal film, a flop as both 21st-century romantic comedy and gay "Kramer vs. Kramer."

One of the least endurable films of 1999.

There isn't a moment of wonder or poetry in its very long 69 minutes.

A gyno-phobic fantasy about the date who won't go away.

There is something especially irritating about whimsy done badly.

Slouches in as a weightless, instantly forgettable picture.

It does... apply Kitano's black-comic style to a different setting, and individual scenes sparkle with unexpected jokes, twists, and occasional cruelties.

This overdone project dissipates its energy in strange ways (sudden shifts to black-and-white, as though hailing the spirit of Oliver Stone and that other Costner JFK movie), and makes you wish its makers had shown the same restraint the government did during the crisis.

The film looks horrendous, poorly composed and staged, and the rhythm staggers.

Little entertainment value.

It may have a good liberal conscience, and genuine sympathy for the rare perspective of a homeless person, but this movie is a fundamentally sentimental exercise.

These are good people, yet the director has them carrying on like community theater actors playing to the balcony. It isn't fair to them, and it isn't fitting for Shakespeare.

Charlize Theron has charm and skill, but no actress could survive this role, which has the gravity and verisimilitude of a sketch from a late-sixties Nancy Sinatra TV special.

Re-adjust the levels of cinematic hell, because "Porky's" just got bumped up a notch.

One wonders if the only original directors left are the obsessives and the freaks. This guy qualifies on both counts.